As a child obsessed with war, I well remember watching Dunkirk, Leslie (father of Barry) Norman’s 1958 film that depicted the events of May-June 1940, when the besieged soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force were stranded on the coast of France, and the combined efforts of the Royal Navy and […]
World War II
Touchez Pas au Grisbi (1954) Jean Gabin and Jacques Becker’s Radical Chic (Review)
There’s an anecdote Martin Scorsese often tells about his childhood that turns up in some variant or other in most of his gangster films. It concerns the future director walking around Little Italy with his mother, noticing that some people seemed to be wearing better clothes and driving better cars […]
Dunkirk – a very loud introduction to war
The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) A gruelling and essential World War II documentary (Review)
Hollywood’s Greatest Underdog
The French film Elle, recently selected for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination, is soon to be released next month in America, bringing the name Verhoeven back into the limelight — although, perhaps not in the way that we might expect. Paul Verhoeven elicits controversy. His films are rarely without contention, […]
The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969) A beautifully photographed diamond in the rough (Review)
Two years after he dropped the critically lauded Sidney Poitier picture, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Stanley Kramer flew over to Italy to begin what-would-be his next big feature, an adaptation of Robert Crichton’s first novel, The Secret of Santa Vittoria. Kramer, the acclaimed director behind the courtroom drama, Judgement […]
The Human Condition (1959) a must-see for any fan of world cinema (Review)
WWII is a frequently used setting throughout the course of cinema history. No matter what, every critically acclaimed filmmaker must have at least one film set in-between the time period of 1939 – 1945. Steven Spielberg presented the horrors of the Holocaust in unflinching black-and-white realism in Schlinder’s List. Wolfgang […]